Category Archives: HR technology

In HRE’s most-recent annual “What Keeps HR Executives Up at Night” survey, HR leaders ranked attracting and retaining diverse talent sixth on their list of top concerns, just below driving culture change and aligning people practices to business.

Of course, it’s hardly a surprise attracting and retaining diverse talent would be a significant concern, considering the obvious benefits of employing a diverse workforce. But that said, there’s also little question employers have a lot more work to do on this front.

The link between diversity and business performance was one of many topics address during the i4cp 2015 Conference, held this week at the Fairmont Princess in Scottsdale, Ariz.

In his opening remarks, Kevin Oakes, CEO of i4cp, referenced a recent research report produced by the institute titled Diversity & Inclusion Practices that Promote Market Performance.

The research found high-performance organizations shared the following characteristics as far as D&I is concerned, including:

Jacqui Roberson, senior director of inclusion and diversity for Grainger, noted that far too many organizations still operate in silos. In order for D&I initiatives to succeed, she said, employers need to get people to “cross over the lines.”

David Green, vice president of diversity at CVS Health, noted that having a CEO who gets it certainly doesn’t hurt. Referring to CVS Health’s recent decision to remove tobacco from its store shelves, Green recalled how, soon after the decision was announced, his CEO came to him and said, “ ‘Just so you know, we need to make sure we’re thinking about what this means in helping [employees] quit tobacco. We need to be focused on multicultural communities, youth communities and lower-income communities.’ … I didn’t have to go knocking on his door to say, ‘What do you think about all those diverse communities.’ ”

At CVS Health, Green said, diversity operates as a separate function, but works closely with HR to ensure shared goals are in place and each group knows what the other is doing.

Altimeter Group Founder and Principal Analyst Charlene Li also explored some key themes from her new book (released Tuesday, the day of her talk) during a session titled “The Engaged Leader: A Strategy for Digital Transformation.” (Her book shares the same title as the session.)

Technologies are changing the nature of relationships, Li said. Yet many leaders, she added, continue to be stuck in the old ways of doing things.

If organizations are going to thrive in the new digital era, she said, that’s going to need to change.

“Technologies come and go,” she said, “but leadership is [always going to be around] and something you need to have a long-term strategy about.”

In her talk, Li shared several examples involving companies that are using technologies to strengthen the link between leaders and employees.

One story she told involved the introduction of a new burger at restaurant chain Red Robin. Soon after the launch, she said, leaders at Red Robin learned through the company’s internal social network that the burger wasn’t very good. Employees were saying on the site that “people were complaining about it” and “the burger was falling apart,” she said.

Listening to that feedback, Li said, the organization quickly realized it had a problem and leaders went back to employees for more details. “They then took [that feedback] back to corporate headquarters, cooked up a new recipe and brought it back to the restaurants in 30 days.”

To put this in context, Li said, “it usually takes 12 to 18 months to change a recipe and get it back to the restaurants, but they did it [in this case] in 30 days!”

As a result, she said, Red Robin didn’t just change the recipe. By recognizing the value these employees were delivering to the organization, she said, “they were able to change [the company’s] relationship with those employees.”

Value—or more precisely the “lack of it”—was one of the reasons behind Sears Holdings Corp.’s decision to begin to seriously revamp its performance-management system last year.

During a session titled “The Rise of the Crowd: How Social Platforms Can Drive Performance and Democratize Performance Management,” two Sears Holdings Corp. HR leaders detailed the retailer’s efforts to transform the way it does performance management.

Aimed at salaried workers, the new initiative is based on the work of Neuroleadership Institute Director David Rock and others.

“The old process was cumbersome and annual reviews were happening three or four months after the year had ended—so by the time we were having the conversation, things were stale,” recalled Phil Menzel, vice president of HR for SHC.

In contrast, Menzel said, the new system is much more agile and responsive.

Using a tool developed internally called GameOn, associates every quarter now sit down to identify up to five objectives for themselves.

The new system also features an online feedback tool called Soundboard, which is accessible to associates. “People can go on the tool and request feedback from anyone in the company or provide feedback,” said Chris Mason, head of strategic talent solutions at SHC. “It gives people something they can take action on right away.”

The final part of the new process is a quarterly “check-in” component aimed at facilitating a more meaningful dialogue between associates and managers.

Martin noted that associates now have to prepare as much for the check-ins (which includes a one-page worksheet) as their managers.

Though still very much a work in progress, the new system has already shown some good traction, according to Menzel and Mason.

Introduced last August, the Soundboard tool already has 10,000 active users and has resulted in 40,000 pieces of feedback. “When we surveyed people, 75 percent said they took the information and actually made a change in [their] behavior,” Mason said.

It’s tough to be a good listener in the workplace these days — even if you consider listening one of your strengths. That’s according to #ListenLearnLead, a new survey out from Accenture today based on responses from 3,600 professionals from 30 countries.

Nearly all of the respondents (96 percent) consider themselves to be “good listeners,” yet 98 percent report that they spend part of their workday multitasking and 64 percent say that listening “has become significantly more difficult in today’s digital workplace.”

Interestingly, though, despite the plethora of smartphones, tablets and other must-have yet highly distractable devices in today’s modern office, the most-cited distractions by the respondents were of the more old-school variety: When asked what interrupts their workday the most, 79 percent cited telephone calls and 72 percent cited unscheduled meetings and visitors. That compares to the 30 percent and 28 percent, respectively, who cited instant messaging and texting.

Rampant multitasking is a routine part of the workday, judging by the survey’s results: Eight in 10 respondents say they multitask on conference calls with work emails, instant messaging, personal emails, social media and reading news and entertainment. Perhaps this is something to keep in mind for your next conference call: if you’re the presenter, try and keep things lively, quick and fast, otherwise your presentation could lose out to the latest goings-on of the Kardashian clan as bored attendees seek relief via their smartphones.

In keeping with general trends, respondents have mixed views on the benefits of technology in the workplace: 58 percent believe technology enables leaders to communicate with their teams easily and quickly, and nearly half cite its ability to enable flexible work from anywhere. However, 62 percent of women and 54 percent of men view technology as “overextending” leaders by making them too accessible. Majorities also agree that information overload (55 percent) and rapidly evolving technology (52 percent) are among the top challenges facing leaders today.

As 2014 draws to a close, folks — as you might expect — now have their eyes set on 2015, and are figuring out what might be in store for their organizations as far as HR and the workplace are concerned. For this final post of the year, I did a quick search of the web to see what people are predicting for next year. For your reading pleasure, here are a few of the things I stumbled upon. (Feel free, of course, to click on any of the links to see the sources’ full list of predictions.)

Establishing a “chief of work.” Peter Andrew, workplace strategy director for Asia at real-estate company CBRE, predicts in Fortune the addition of a new position: chief of work. Most C-suites have not added new roles since the chief-information-officer title took hold about 20 years ago, but CBRE’s research suggests that’s about to change. For one thing, Andrew writes, companies today have human resources, IT and real-estate all acting separately and, often, unwittingly working against each other. He suggests that a chief of work would coordinate all that, with an eye toward building a culture that attracts top talent. Finding the most efficient balance between full-time employees and a growing army of independent contractors, he adds, will also be in that individual’s wheelhouse.

The rise of mobile assessments. From website CPA Practice Advisor: Mobile assessments will be increasingly tapped for selection, performance management, and training and development decisions. Technology, including social media and social collaboration, is changing the science and practice of selection, recruitment, performance management, engagement and learning, the article says. And I-O psychologists, it continues, will work to design assessments that are valid and reliable, regardless of how and where they are delivered.

Every child born in the next 12 months will learn coding as a core subject. Increasingly, Samsung writes, governments are recognizing that computer literacy is a fundamental, basic skill and are incorporate coding into their curriculums. For example, the UK, it says, launched a new computing curriculum during the current academic year, in which children as young as five are taught programming skills. In 2015 and beyond, Samsung predicts, such education innovations will gradually become the norm, with businesses, educators and governments working together to raise skills across Europe. Longer-term, it says, this trend will help spur the use of internships, as businesses recognize that they can benefit from welcoming young, computer-literate people into their organizations. “The need for employees to be computer literate,” Samsung says, will result in a wave of coding schools that will help longtime employees learn coding quickly.

Honesty will become a revered leadership trait. In a Forbes article, contributor Dan Schawbel predicts that “companies are going to start embracing transparency more next year as younger generations are demanding it.” Leaders, Schawbel writes, won’t just have to be good at inspiring and educating; they will have to be able to instill trust through honesty. “It’s only natural that people would want to work under leaders who are open about what the company is doing [and] where it’s heading in the future, and give honest feedback regularly,” he writes.

Niche becomes the norm. Korn Ferry’s Futurestep unit predicts “niche will become the norm” in talent acquisition. “Now that organizations grasp the power of data,” Futurestep says, “next year, the challenge will be to prove ROI on all activities using analytics.” Organizations, it notes, need to be clear on the touch points that fit best with the types of candidates they are looking to attract. To that end, it says, interest and demand in creating functional talent communities is becoming top of mind as businesses strive to target hard to reach groups.

“Niche talent requires niche strategies,” says Chong Ng, president of Futurestep’s Asia- Pacific operation. “Whether it is businesses seeking high-demand talent such as STEM candidates, or organizations located in high-potential growth locations looking to specifically attract local talent back in the country, employers need to be more sophisticated in their attraction and retention methodologies in order to find and keep candidates.”

Companies will set new hiring priorities. Website Customer Think predicts employers will pay a lot closer attention to soft skills in 2015. “In the past,” writes Marcelo Brahimllari, “candidates were hired for open positions based primarily on their skills and experience. The ability to ‘do the work’ was traditionally valued over other skills.” But with more competition for jobs and deeper talent pools today, Brahimllari says, many employers are considering candidates’ so-called “soft” skills just as much, if not more, than education and experience. Employers, he writes, want to hire applicants who fit with the culture of the organization and share in its values. Traits such as honesty, flexibility, positive mind-set, creativity and leadership skills, he says, are being looked upon as being just as important as the ability to crunch numbers or write code.

By now, I’m sure most of you are quite familiar with Sony’s data breach, which has occupied headlines over the past couple of weeks.

As you might expect, much of the attention surrounds the hacker’s decision to post some of Sony’s yet-to-be-released movies, including a remake of Annie and a new film titled The Interview — a comedy about two American journalists who are recruited to assassinate North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. A group named Guardians of the Peace have taken credit for the cyber attack, but some have speculated the North Korean government could be the real culprit here, since it’s none too pleased with TheInterview’s storyline. (Others doubt this is the case, and North Korea has publicly denied its involvement.)

Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at the private security firm Trend Micro, told the New York Times after the story broke that “unlike stealth attacks from China and Russia, Sony’s hackers not only aimed to steal data, but also to send a clear message. ‘This was like a home invasion where, after taking the family jewels, the hackers set the house ablaze,’ ” he said.

Though it certainly has been well covered in the mainstream press, just a tad less attention has been paid to the non-creative information liberated from Sony’s computers—employee Social Security numbers, healthcare records, salary information and performance reviews. Sure, Sony isn’t the first to experience such an HR data breach, but there’s little question the scope and nature of the information made public (which includes salaries of executives) make this breach especially noteworthy.

I can only imagine the kind of disruption this is likely causing at Sony—and the toll it’s taking on productivity. Not to mention the financial toll it’s going to have.

I also have to think more than a few CEOs, after reading the various stories appearing in the press, were once again wondering, “Could something like this occur here?”

Yesterday, I asked Gordon Rapkin, CEO of Archive Systems, an HR-document-management firm based in Fairfield, N.J., for his take on what happened at Sony.

“My impression is a chunk of the Sony HR breach has to do with people there who kept things on their computers that shouldn’t have been kept there,” he said. What the field, he adds, calls “shadow files.”

What’s more, Rapkin said, the fact that all this information was unprotected and unencrypted and seemed to be available in the same trove that was pilfered is pretty surprising. “Usually,” he said, “[the information] is carved up in different systems and kept in different files—with salary information in one place, benefit information in another, and employment and performance in a third. But here, it looks as though all of this was accessible in the same place. That’s surprising, especially when you consider HR information represents some of the more sensitive data a company possesses.”

Lisa Rowan, vice president of research at IDC in Framingham, Mass., agrees. “It seems odd for [these] to be stored together,” she said.

At a recent records-management conference he attended, Rapkin said his company surveyed attendees on how many felt HR followed their organization’s information-governance policies. One-third of those queried, he said, responded that HR didn’t follow those policies and procedures. Hardly a vote of confidence.

Perhaps Sony is the latest company to get hit, Rapkin explained, but, he added, “I think the problem may be fairly common.”

I was so struck by the simplicity of a recent post on the Horses for Sources website, run by IT and outsourcing expert Phil Fersht and his team of global-sourcing analysts, that I was compelled to share it here.

The gist of it is that buyers of technology services want little more than to turn a whole lot more control over to their service providers; this, it points out, is their No. 1 choice for a course of action to “reset these stale services relationships to drive more value beyond labor arbitrage and standard operational delivery.”

And this is what’s top-of-mind for services buyers, the post says, despite what you and I keep hearing about all the other hyped-up tech trends it cites: “how robotic automation, digital technology … big data and outcome-based pricing are going to be the biggest game changers to disrupt the business world since the invention of the desk.”

I love what follows, I guess to depict where all this excitable tech thinking is going to take us:

“Suddenly, there’s going to be minimal need for human labor … so we’ll just sit at home all day running our lives from our mobile devices sequencing our own genomes using some cool analytics app that we only need to pay for once we’ve added 10 years to our life expectancy. Somebody please shoot me now … let’s dial this dialog back to reality for a few minutes.”

Indeed, as reality would have it, when Horses for Sources asked attendees of its recent gathering of enterprise buy-side operations leaders in Chicago to choose among six actions that would best “improve the quality and outcome of your current sourcing initiative,” the winner, by far, was “the buyer letting go and giving more responsibility and value processes to [the] provider.”

Here’s the HfS response to that:

“Oh my god. After all the whining about things like, ‘All they do is sell to us,’ and ‘All that cool stuff they promised us during the sales process and never delivered’ … the real reason behind this stagnation is the simple fact that most buyers are just struggling to let go!”

In order to do that, though, they need to — you got it — trust that their providers can take on higher-value work from them. And to earn that trust, providers need to prove they can do that. In the words of HfS:

“This means many need to change behavior … the [oh-so-boring] overselling needs to stop and the demonstration of real value needs to start. … Service buyers do not ‘let go’ until they know they have a safe pair of hands to trust with their beloved processes … .”

As expected, Ray Wang gave attendees at HR Tech’s closing session, “Transforming the Future of Work,” a lot to think about last Friday.

In his usual highly energetic way, Wang, founder and principal analyst of Constellation Research, explored how technology is altering work as we know it—and what HR and IT leaders need to do to prepare for the new business models that are emerging.

Early on in his remarks, he touched on the parts mobile, social, the cloud and Big Data are playing—and are going to play—in shaping the digital landscape of tomorrow.

“Mobile is not about the device,” Wang told the packed room. “When you mobile-enable something, it means you can do it in motion … ” in 30 seconds or less.

Social, meanwhile, is not about the networks, but about creating brand-new verbs such as “share, like and publish,” and about engaging people.

The cloud? It’s an option that allows you to say, “ ‘Hey, I don’t need to worry about technology [and] can spend more time improving the process and improving the experience.” And Big Data isn’t about information, but about the insights that can be generated and about making better decisions.

At the end of the day, Wang said, the goal is for businesses to take all of this data and create new experiences and outcomes. Today, he said, companies are in the “outcomes business” and building relationships, not selling products and services.

In turn, Wang said, this is inevitably going to impact the kinds of people they are hiring, the skill sets they need and the ways they are structured.

In the digital world, what’s the best way to hire away your competitor’s talent? he asked. “Monitor LinkedIn,” he said. “If you see 48 changes at the same company, you know something’s going down. The signals are all there.”

Wang told attendees that companies are going to need to continually look to the data to generate meaningful insights and thereby make better bias-free decisions.

In line with that, he predicted that more companies are going to be appointing chief digital officers who are dedicated to thinking about and operationalizing the organization’s digital strategy—and he suggested that all leaders are going to need to be digitally enabled.

Going forward, Wang said, HR and IT are going to have to work more closely together.

“If you’re on the HR side,” he said, “you want it simple, no manuals. You also want the ability to have it scalable [so you don’t] need to call IT to make a change. You want it sexy”—so people will want to use it.

In contrast, he said, IT wants it safe. “You don’t want to take the system out. You want to make sure that the system is not going to be insecure, [since] you don’t want to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. And you want to make sure it’s a sustainable platform … .”

An interesting little recruiting story came out of a late-afternoon session at the HR Technology® Conference in Las Vegas Thursday. Slugged “How Red Hat Approaches Hiring Beyond Traditional Social Networks,” the session featured Brad Warga, senior vice president of customer and employee success for Gild Inc., a San Francisco-based technology-talent search firm, and Don Farr, director of global-talent acquisition for Red Hat, a global open-source provider.

“We found [traditional candidate sources such as] LinkedIn just weren’t providing the recruiting results we needed,” Farr told conference attendees. Long story short, he knew Warga, but not much about Gild, so decided to try him out with an assignment: Find him 200 top technology developers in a city abroad where Red Hat does business. Warga turned it around in record time “and more than half of the developers on his list were already employees of Red Hat,” said Farr.

Pretty convincing. So Farr decided to use Gild’s sourcing and reporting tool, based on far-more specific tech-developer social-media data — including code information and technical questions and answers, indicating levels of focus and expertise — to complement the recruiting system he already had in place.

Not only has it enriched Red Hat’s recruiting, with vastly improved and far enhanced returns on the right kinds of candidates for the growing company, it’s even provided some surprises.

Key among them was proof it needed to enhance its employee-referral service as well. Using Gild’s tools and services, Red Hat was able to determine that 70 percent of its developers who came in outside the referral program were actually connected in some way to current employees through social media.

“In other words,” said Farr, “we could have hired them ourselves if we had just sourced them through more social [streams]. The connections were out there.”

Long story short, Farr convinced his CEO to invest more in employee referrals and the savings are already being realized.

“We now have an employee-referral portal tracked through our applicant-tracking system,” Farr said. “We’ve effectively built a process where referrals aren’t going into a black box anymore.”

Lesson learned here? “Take advantage of the opportunity to embrace social media in multiple ways,” particularly when you’re looking for something as specific and hard to find as tech developers, he said.

“This is really the story of the old guard and the new guard,” Farr added. “You have to adapt or die.”

“If talent is the most important part of every business, then why do we manage it so badly?”

This question, posed near the beginning of Jason Averbook’s presentation at HR Tech 2014, titled “What the End of the ‘Job’ Means for the Future of Work and Talent Management,” was one of the major themes of his talk. Averbook, chief innovation officer at technology consulting firm Appirio and author of the new book HR: From Now to Next, repeatedly made the point that as the nature of work undergoes drastic change, the talent-management practices still used by a majority of companies today also need to be transformed, or perhaps jettisoned altogether.

“Many of the talent processes still in use today come from a time when our economy was manufacturing-based,” he said. “So today, most of our talent practices are broken down old pieces of crap — we manage people like they were machines, with annual performance reviews, timekeeping, performance ratings.”

Talent is the most important part of any business and, unlike machinery, can’t be easily replaced, said Averbook. So why, he asked, do HR departments continue to subject this precious resource to outmoded processes that no one — not even HR itself — believes actually work?

“How many of you here believe that your performance-management process actually helps improve performance?” he challenged the audience. When only one person raised his hand, Averbook asked “So why, then, do you continue to use it?”

These outmoded processes include how most organizations go about measuring employee engagement, said Averbook,

“If engagement is so important, how come you’re only measuring it once or twice a year?” he said. “Do you look at your Facebook page just once a year, to see if anyone ‘liked’ your stuff? Engagement should be something you look at every day.”

Twitter can be an excellent way to determine employee engagement because it can reflect current engagement levels, rather than what they were six months ago, said Averbook. HR is a business function, not a support function, he said, and as such, its technology for supporting talent should incorporate the following five principles:

It should be real time

It should be looking now and forward, not backward

It should be based on killing silos within the organization

Its processes should be for the good of the business, not HR

It should be easy.

As the nature of work and jobs continues to change, with many organizations moving toward an independent-contractor model, talent processes can no longer be cyclical and the technology supporting them can’t be user-unfriendly, said Averbook.

“You’ve heard of business-to-business — well, now we live in a business-to-employee world, and if a process isn’t simple, employes won’t do it,” he said.

And if your technology vendors can’t provide tools that are simple and intuitive and that meet your specific needs, then build your own, said Averbook.

Based on new research released Wednesday at the 17th Annual HR Technology® Conference and discussed in Thursday’s opening general session, employers and HR leaders seem to have some exciting new arsenal for recreating, reshaping and sustaining their workforces of tomorrow.

The research, to be released in quarterly reports as part of an ongoing ADP Workforce Vitality Report, measures the total real wages paid to the U.S. private-sector workforce based on a number of metrics, including job holders’ wages, job holders’ hours worked, job switchers’ wages and total employment. Although this index, at 110.6 in the third quarter of 2014, is considered the report’s baseline, it did show 0.77 percent growth from the previous quarter.

So job growth, as measured by this new combination of statistics, is, essentially, going up.

What’s especially exciting, though, seems to be the potential future indicators that so much data can provide the employment sector, when you consider it’s depth — based on the wages and employment profiles of ADP’s more than 50 million (one in six) paycheck recipients.

Segments of the U.S. workforce and the growth of wages and hours worked in any industry in any state are now tangible, or at least potentially tangible, showing where growth is strongest and weakest, and perhaps why. Segments “by age, by income, by full-time and part-time status, and even by gender” will also be available, “the latter of which is especially exciting to me,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, head of the ADP Research Institute, at the panel discussion.

The session — moderated by David Gergen, senior political analyst at CNN, and including panelists John Boudreau, professor and research director at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business; Steven Cochrane managing director at Moody’s Analytics; Steven Rice, executive vice president of HR for Juniper Networks; and Yildirmaz — took in differing perspectives on just what all this data might mean.

Although the report indicates the South is leading the Northeast in job creation, and low-wage jobs — as in trade, transportation and retail — are leading over higher-income positions, questions still loom over whether this retail boom “is driven by higher wages or higher numbers of jobs” since the data combines all factors into one vitality — or growth — index, said Boudreau.

Moreover, “HR folks today can think of [where to find, place and develop talent] like a chess game, playing it in a more nuanced way,” he said. For instance, the index looks at four types of workers in the labor market: those who stay with the same firm (job holders), those who change jobs (job switchers), those newly hired (entrants) and those who left the firm either voluntarily or involuntarily (leavers).

Where index indicators show higher numbers of “leavers” or “entrants” — be they by industry or region — or higher-level jobs unfilled, “HR folks can be asking, ‘What would it take to make [a particular] pocket of folks who aren’t ready to fill this new talent need more ready for this need as opposed to [having to] seek talent outside the organization?’ ” said Boudreau.

The dynamics of the numeric indications, said Cochrane, actually show “economic growth happening everywhere … we have moved through the downturn, albeit in the context of a slow-growing economy … but the gap is widening between the South and West, and the Northeast and Midwest” … and this could be indicative of growth in general in the South, as in Texas oil and energy, and the “structure of the economy changing.”

Rice left attendees with an important reminder as the sole HR practitioner on the panel; that being that, while the ADP data is a start and a helpful tool, the main goal for all HR leaders using it will be to “build the best workforce to build our companies of the future.”

Looking at organizations, he said, “has completely changed for heads of HR [in terms of] where talent is located, where it’s leaving, cost of labor, etc.” It’s far more of a global challenge now.

“We need to be able to tap into that new talent pool,” said Rice. “There’s a lot of shifting, too, in terms of skill sets and teaching of skill sets to tie into that changing talent pool.”

HR leaders are also grappling with when it makes sense to bring talent together under one roof versus allowing for more virtual project work and collaboration.

“We all need to be asking, ‘What are the areas where we can drive the talent for our ideal workforce?’ ” said Rice. “This kind of data can help.”

When you’re a first-time passenger in a Google driverless car rolling down busy Highway 101 near San Francisco, you go through three phases, said HR Technology Conference keynote speaker Andrew McAfee: the first is “raw, abject terror,” quickly followed by phase 2 — active fascination. Twenty minutes in, that tends to be followed by the third and final phase: mild boredom.

“These cars are programmed to drive the way we were taught to in driver’s ed classes and then promptly forgot,” said McAfee, principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of the recent bestseller The Second Machine Age. “There’s no speeding or abrupt lane changes — it feels like riding an airport monorail.”

McAfee’s driverless car adventure was the indirect result of a book by two professor colleagues, who had written that despite the advances of computers and robotics, they would probably never overtake human beings’ ability to master and rapidly adapt to quickly changing patterns. Thus, they wrote, a computer could never do something like navigate a car through heavy traffic. The book in question, The New Division of Labor, was published in 2004. Six years later, Google announced that its engineers had been riding in computer-guided cars for a number of years.

“As soon as I heard that, I knew I had to experience it,” said McAfee.

The subject of McAfee’s talk, “Making the Right Choices in the Second Machine Age,” was that we’re now living in the greatest era of transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Driverless cars, supercomputers that handily beat long-time Jeopardy! champions and cheap, flexible robots mean that many jobs long-thought to be “automation-proof” because they could only be done by humans will likely be taken over by artificial intelligence. This will, of course, have huge implications for the workplace and for enterprises, he said.

“I don’t think all this will result in enormous factories staffed by only two employees, one of whom is a dog whose job is to bite the human if he tries to touch anything important,” said McAfee. “But I do think we need to re-examine the boundaries between technology and humans and rethink our business models.”

Ideally, human intelligence and artificial intelligence can complement each other, he said. He cited organizations that opened themselves to input from outsiders and used data algorithms to greatly improve service, accuracy and productivity. Such organizations stand in sharp contrast to those that continue to rely on “HiPPOs,” or “the highest-paid person’s opinion,” whether it be the CEO or highly paid outside consultants.

“Some HiPPOs will take data in, but it’s their gut that ultimately makes the decision,” said McAfee.

Geeks, by comparison (McAfee considers “geek” a compliment and describes them as people who are “fascinated and driven by data”) are willing to ignore their gut and follow the data to where it leads them.

This reaps notable dividends, he said: Companies that adopt “data-driven decision-making” achieve a level of productivity that’s 5 percent to 6 percent higher than those that don’t. Digital intelligence is remaking occupations from dairy farming to pathology — indeed, a digital pathologist created by Stanford scientists has proven to be better, on average, at cancer detection than highly trained human pathologists, said McAfee.

For organizations, he said, the upshot of all this must be that they make themselves more open to data-driven approaches and to outsiders who promise to bring in different ways of thinking and doing things, rather than continuing to rely on HiPPOs. He cited the Obama 2012 campaign, which not only brought in “data geeks” to identify new ways of identifying and motivating voters but put them in charge of key operations — a sharp departure from most political campaigns, he said.

“A lot of companies will not be open to this approach, and that will lead to a lot of disruption,” he said. “But if we can find new ways to combine human and digital intelligence, then the sky’s the limit.”